ANIMATED SHORT: PRE-PRODUCTION

This post includes updated pre-production after our class feedback session, design and modelling.

There will be reference to influences throughout, however, for a more comprehensive and detailed explanation of our research and meaning see the research post.

STORYBOARD

Here, Patrick updated our storyboard based from our own notes and class feedback.

Notable changes in the storyboard; Trev is a robot, and as suggested in feedback the bird is incorporated into the story. The purpose of the window cleaners are to clean up an extreme case of bird poop;

COLOUR/LIGHTING

Ah, this changed a lot.

The final decision was a monochromatic warm environment (a neutral base for which the action could be placed).

The characters visually and literally disrupt the ordinary world with conflicting views and colours. Green and red complimentary colours imply the character’s differences, foreshadowing a distaste before the action begins. Visual cues (staging) were important to express within the first few seconds due to the time limit.

The yellow sky established an alien, quirky vibe to the scene which heightened our designs. The palette on the left is the older version;

DUSTY CHARACTER DESIGN/MODELLING

Dusty is designed and animated as a grumpy, hardworking, older man in attempts to clearly represent the traditional side of the story.

Features such as the tattered overalls, large arms and hands reflect his labor. Big hands and arms designed to believably lift his body up the ladder and wash a lot of windows. His silhouette is square, robust, reliable, yet unmovable and stuck in his ways. Similar to ‘Carl’ in ‘Up’ (2009, dir. Pete Docter).

Design;

Colour model;

Patrick’s personality test;

TREV CHARACTER DESIGN/MODELLING

Robot inspiration came from online articles about new window washing robots. Trev’s earlier design had mixed reviews – some recognized him as a cool, younger guy while others were confused by a younger character washing windows. Consequently, I thought we should design our own sentient window washing robot to compete with human Dusty.

Trev’s silhouette is slim and tall – the opposite of Dusty. Features include large comical teeth as in the script Trev laughs at Dusty’s weakness throughout. While he represents the modern, his design is quite tattered and pieced together, this was to enforce the quirky nature of our scene and echoed in the cliff design;

Design;

Colour model;

Patrick’s personality test;

EGG DESIGN/MODELLING

We needed some eggs for the nest based on Trev and Dusty’s design. I believed this unity of design would create a consistency in our world, so props appear as though they naturally belong in the scene;

ENVIRONMENT MODELLING

Sky texture, mirroring the cliffs and the two opposing characters (small/tall). The clouds outline the cliffs directing attention to the action;

Some preliminary sketches of the house design. Megan later designed and modelled the houses, but below are my silhouettes based on my early sketches;

Poop splats for the houses;

There were early decisions to model wacky trees for our scene, similar to those in ‘The Lorax’ (2012, dir. Chris Renaud). For the sake of clarity in the already growing busyness of the scene we decided to scrap the idea, but it could have looked cool;

RIGGING

I created a rig for the bird poop – biFrost was not emitting the desired exaggerated cartoon effect, so I decided I would animate it manually using a lattice rig and controllers;